Nelken in Aspik

Wolfgang Schmidt is far more talented at socialist networking than he is as a commercial artist, which makes him popular at the state-run East German “house of advertising”. The head of the cadre promotes the loquacious ad man. But an overly firm congratulatory handshake causes Schmidt to bite down so hard that he loses one of his front teeth; a second falls victim to a zealous dentist. To hide the resulting lisp, he stops talking altogether. His silence marks him as a brilliant innovator and he “falls upward” in the hierarchy. Advancing to director general of the ad squad, he pushes the illusion to its logical conclusion by having all the public advertising replaced with blank, white surfaces …
“You can’t get more radical than that!” The motto of the protagonist portrayed with abandon by Armin Mueller-Stahl seems to have guided director Günter Reisch as well. His subversive satire of a dysfunctional working environment is defined by tongue-in-cheek commentary and the dissolution of cinematic form. Film critic Georg Seesslen called it “most closely related to the films of Richard Lester, who allowed his heroes (like the Beatles) to fully break with social mores and romp at will”.